TED CHERNIN

My Experiences in the Honolulu Chinatown Red-Light District

I CAME TO HONOLULU in December 1938 along with about a dozen other civilians aboard the troop ship USS Henderson, taking a full nine days to make the crossing from San Francisco. That came about because in January one of the engineering professors at the Univer- sity of California, where I was a senior in electrical engineering, told the class that it looked like a bad year for engineers and advised us to look into a government civil service announcement posted in the hall- way for engineering positions of all kinds. I applied but heard nothing more until October, months after I had graduated, when a telegram came from the Navy Department asking me if I would accept a job as junior radio engineer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard at $2,000 per year, plus a 25 percent cost-of- living allowance. That was more than twice the going rate for engi- neers. I had to look in an atlas to find where Pearl Harbor was and learned it was in the Hawaiian Islands about ten miles from Honolulu. I quickly replied YES. A stiff two-day examination was required in those days to qualify for civil service, but since I had graduated in June (my major was in communications with a minor in electric power), I passed it easily. The ship left San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day, and I became seasick but recovered in time to enjoy several days of watching por- poises and flying fish playing as they accompanied the ship. The ship

Ted Chernin lives in Pearl City and is a frequent contributor to Honolulu newspapers on current and historical topics.

The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 34 (2000)

203 204 THE HAWAIIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY docked in Honolulu on Friday, December 2, 1938, and after the chilly weather I was accustomed to, the relatively high temperature and humidity as I walked down the gangplank made me feel as though I had entered a Turkish bath though it was after 7 P.M. It took me more than a year to become acclimated. The several civil service recruits for Pearl Harbor employment (the single men) were taken to the Army-Navy YMCA at the corner of Hotel and Richards streets. My employment was in the Design Division, known at that time as the Industrial Drafting Room, along with three other recruits: Conrad R. Muller, who much later headed the IEEE Standards Committee, Joseph Baresh, and William F. Keller. I stayed at the Army-Navy Y a week, then moved to a cottage in Waikikl, "batching" it. I found myself spending all my time in the downtown area, especially the colorful Chinatown and adjacent areas, so I decided to move back. A co-worker, Daniel Y. S. Pang, an old-timer there, had taken me under his wing when I arrived, and when he learned of this, he got me a room at the Nu'uanu YMCA, only a couple of blocks from the downtown and Chinatown areas. Strangely, I had never visited San Francisco's Chinatown while I lived there. I am forever grateful to Dan Pang for showing me the ropes and making me feel at home here, on and off the job—also to Bung Tong Chang, Lee Hau Chun, Charles Jo Wong, Chew Wong, David Mun Chew "China" Wong, Leon Young, and many other "locals." I would walk a few blocks from the Nu'uanu Y to the downtown and Chinatown areas, and I would see local women who had come in from the countryside, the Japanese women dressed in their colorful and beautiful kimono and obi, wearing ornate zori (Japanese slippers); Hawaiian women with their holoku gowns and wearing lei around their necks and haku lei on their heads, some of the younger ones with a flower on one ear or the other to indicate whether they were available or spoken for; Korean women in their voluminous costumes reminiscent of nuns' habits, only white in color; and Chinese women in colorfully embroidered silk blouses and black silk slacks, some hobbling because their feet had been bound when they were infants, in accordance with ancient Chinese customs. We all had three-year contracts expiring on December 4, 1941. According to the contract terms, we were eligible for the first available transportation, nicknamed FAT, be it government or commercial, a MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 205

common arrangement. Baresch, Keller, and I left on the Matson liner Lurline on Friday, December 5, 1941, thereby escaping the attack the following Sunday, December 7. Muller, who worked in the Radio Sec- tion, stayed behind. I wanted to, also, but our boss, W. W. Mcllhenny, would allow only one of us to stay, and I lost the toss of the coin. When people not aware of the three-year contract expressed surprise that I should leave after enjoying the life in Honolulu for three years, I would kid them by saying, "Oh, I had advance notice." Some of them would look at me suspiciously. Bill Keller and I got into some misadventures on board ship and were taken for spies but were cleared by the FBI upon arrival in San Francisco December 10. Just a few months later, in April 1942, Keller and I returned to our jobs in the shipyard. I had begun to feel home- sick for the Islands and was happy to be back. Some of my fellow students at Cal had shipped out during summer vacation to earn tuition and living expenses doing menial jobs on Mat- son ships that sailed between Hawai'i and the mainland. I had heard from them that Honolulu had an open red-light district in its China- town. When I asked about this upon my arrival at the Army-Navy Y, I was quickly shown these "houses of ill repute." A localism for them was "boogie houses": the women were "heads." A euphemism used when suggesting a visit to one was "let's go climb the stairs," because almost all were in upstairs locations. I knew of ten that were crammed into the very few streets and square blocks of Chinatown, bounded by Beretania, River, Kukui, and Nu'uanu streets, and five more on the outskirts (Fig. 1).1 It was interesting that, although illegal, their existence was accepted as necessary. Originally located in Iwilei, they were moved to the Chinatown area.2 To make them acceptable, they were very strictly controlled, the Honolulu Police Department having the chore of keeping them in line. The "girls" were medically examined weekly. They were required to live in the houses. They were not allowed to do any streetwalking, and when they went out, they were not allowed to be accompanied by anyone. Curfew was 10:30 P.M. They could visit only certain beach areas during weekdays. No drugs or alcohol were allowed. The madams were required to see that the girls behaved and caused no trouble. The houses were required to be kept in a clean, neat, and sanitary condition. To this day, I can recall the characteris- FIG I. Map of Chinatown locations of houses of prostitution during World War II, drawn by the author from memory about 1966. Letters A through K indicate movie theaters; the letter X indicates the author's "pads." MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 207 tic odor of the disinfectant that was used to mop the floors and clean the walls and furniture every day. One could say that, except for their profession, the women lived almost like nuns. But rules are made to be broken, it seems, because I understood much later that some drugs and alcohol were involved. The girls realized, however, that their livelihoods depended on retaining their youth and good looks, so I believe most of them abstained. At least, in all the years that I fre- quented these houses, from December 1938 to April 1944, I never met one, whether I was socializing or otherwise, who appeared to be high. They all seemed perfectly normal and sober, joining happily in conversations, and contented, but for one exception (Fig. 2). This was a girl I happened to have known slightly at Lowell High School in San Francisco years before, a very beautiful little girl. She was sad and unhappy that she had been misled, and to bear it, she was so liquored up that I could smell the alcohol on her breath. The houses had long been accepted as a matter of course, part of normal living, and they did not have the tawdry, secretive, back-alley atmosphere that might be expected by someone not accustomed to brothels operating openly in a business district. Being known as a customer of these places did not tarnish one's reputation and did not affect one's acceptability in society, that I knew of. I made it no secret that I patronized them and found that had no effect at all on my rela- tionships with other people, men or women, or on my job. At my retirement party in April 1971, long after they had been closed down and I had been married to a local girl from Hilo for seventeen years, I was presented by my co-workers with a gift of one of those old-time folding gas station maps, marked with the locations of all the houses, as a souvenir of my single days. I've observed that people alive today who lived in those times still have that acceptance of prostitution and are proponents of it. The Pearl Harbor naval base was not far away, and when a num- ber of ships docked after long trips at sea, the sailors flocked to these places and formed long lines outside the doors to wait their turn, blocking entrances to the many adjacent restaurants and shops of all kinds. The restaurant goers and local shoppers, mostly housewives, would thread their way through the lines, unconcerned, to get to the entrances of their destinations. 2O8 THE HAWAIIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY

There actually were not enough girls and houses, and there were men who would not patronize prostitutes, so many servicemen tried to make dates with and seduce local girls. This led to fights with local boys and occasional beatings of servicemen. Local boys were jailed for this when their motive was to protect their sisters from predatory, transient, possibly diseased males. It was extremely difficult, however,

WE LOVE. YOU ALL

AT THE. NEW SENATOR HOTEL

FIG 2. Girls from the New Senator Hotel, likely posed by a photographer in his studio in 1940. (Author's collection) MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 2OO, to get approval from police chief William F. Gabrielson to open more houses. I believe his motive was to keep the whole thing low key by limiting their numbers. Only a few more houses were allowed to open in Chinatown, in 1941, because the military buildup for the coming war was adding thousands of servicemen to the city's streets. Another aspect of keeping the existence of these houses low key was their locations. There were two on upper Fort Street, the Senator Hotel and the Ambassador Hotel, which were judged out of place because they were only a block above the Nu'uanu Yand an interme- diate school and the Harris Memorial Church on an adjacent corner. They were made to relocate. The Senator became the New Senator and was next door to the famous Wo Fat Chinese Restaurant. The Ambassador became the Pacific Rooms on Maunakea Street. Often two or three guys who were pals, or even singly, would visit one of these places just to talk and socialize with the girls. These visits kept them off the street and also even served to get bashful guys used to getting along with girls. The houses were almost like social clubs, later reminding me of Jimmy Stewart's movie, The Cheyenne Social Club, and Bert Reynolds's The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, except that they were very sparsely furnished. Even so, I would say that Honolulu Chinatown could have boasted of having 'The Best Little Red-Light District in the U.S." (Fig. 3 and Fig. 4). In conversation with the girls, I learned that many had as steady customers older married men who for some reason or other were not getting along with their wives. Some would think this was terrible, but I think that it served to keep families intact. This arrangement was acceptable to the wives; the "other woman" was not someone the hus- band would leave home for or lavish money on and thereby break up the home. It was interesting to learn that as well as the ones mentioned above, many men, after choosing one particular girl in one of these houses, would remain more or less faithful to her, very rarely seeing someone else, as if she were a surrogate wife. When he would come to her house and be told by the maid (each establishment had a maid, usu- ally a Hawaiian woman, stationed at the door to screen prospective customers) that "she's having her flowers" (menstruating), he would leave and return several days later. I turned out to be one of those. 2 1O THE HAWAIIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY

My surrogate wife was the first girl I met, nicknamed Bobbie (all had assumed names), in the Rex Rooms, and it was love at first sight. Some of these relationships resulted in marriage. I personally knew of one, but it ended badly for the unfortunate woman as the man turned out to be a wife beater. There normally was quite a bit of turnover among the girls, almost every ship carrying several back and forth between the Islands and San Francisco, but Bobbie stayed on. She later moved to the Cottage, never changing in appearance, a quiet girl. I also learned that some fathers took their university-age sons to these places so as to relieve their urges for female companionship and allow them to keep their mind on their studies, undistracted by the women students. This is indicative of the degree to which the exis-

FIG 3. The former Bungalow Rooms on Smith Street about 1984. (Author's collec- tion) MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 211 tence of these illegal but well-run establishments were accepted. Their existence was a boon also to men who for some reason or other did not "make out" with girls and enabled them to have some female companionship. The going rate for locals was $2.00, and in those days that amounted to a full day's wages for the average common working man, so relationships with the girls were automatically limited by econom- ics. The rate for servicemen was $3.00. The locals and the servicemen were given access to two different parts of the establishments, some by means of separate doors, because many servicemen were not com- fortable with the idea that the brown-skinned locals of various nationalities—Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and so forth—could have the same girls that they did. This separation led

FIG 4. The former Service Rooms on Maunakea and Pauahi streets, about 1984. (Author's collection) 2 12 THE HAWAIIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY them to believe that the girls were segregated into two groups. In fact, they were not. The girls serviced all comers. I was always taken for local because I had developed a deep tan at the beaches. On one occasion, when I went to the back entrance of the Service Hotel reserved for locals, a new maid denied me entrance. I assumed it was because she thought I was not local and wanted me to go to the front entrance. I went around to the front but was peremptorily told to go to the back entrance. I went to the back, and when I was denied entrance once again, I asked why. The maid said, "I no like Portagee come inside, they too rough with the wahines." She thought I was Portuguese. I didn't make it into the Service Hotel that time. The medical attention given to the girls, who in turn carefully inspected their customers, lessened the spread of venereal disease, or VD (now termed sexually transmitted diseases, or STD). Also, one could go to a drugstore and buy a small tube of colloidal silver cream with which to treat oneself. Additionally, the military maintained sev- eral prophylaxis stations in the Kukui residential district on the north- easterly side of Chinatown, where servicemen could go for treatment after having visited a brothel. This is in sharp contrast to the situations where prostitution is illegal and therefore unregulated and unsuc- cessfully suppressed, and amateur prostitutes operating clandestinely serve numerous customers, seeking no medical attention until they become obviously sick, having passed their sickness on to many cus- tomers. This program was not 100 percent successful as at times there were evasions and also the possibility of infection occurring between the weekly examinations in spite of the care the girls took of them- selves. Without this program and the quasi-legal status of the houses, however, I believe that the VD rate would have been much higher, as is usually found to be the case when prostitution is suppressed, than the comparatively low rate found here under the tight control that existed. After the war broke out, the demand for the girls' services far out- stripped their limited numbers and capabilities to handle all the men, and a "mass production" scheme was devised. It consisted of enclo- sures with four small rooms that operated in this way. In the first room, the man was dressing, the girl having just left after finishing a cursory washup of both. The girl was in the next room having a "love MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 213 affair." In the third room, a man was ready and waiting, and in the fourth room a man had just entered and was proceeding to undress. In this way, a girl could handle twelve or more men per hour, and when she tired, another girl took over. The rooms were called "bull pens." In some cases, the man was so charged up after having had no female contact for months that he ejaculated on seeing or being touched by the naked girl before he could do anything, upon which the girl would give him a "rain check" so that he could come back later without having to pay again. It was customary to hand out rain checks when for some reason a man could not perform. The houses were no longer permitted to be open at night and were accessible to civilians only during the daytime. Consequently, when I wanted to visit my "surrogate wife," it was necessary for me to use up a couple of hours of earned annual leave to take off from work. I had a very understanding boss, Raymond DeBaugh, who allowed me to interrupt my work twice a week to do this. By this time, my surrogate wife had moved to the Cottage Rooms on River Street (Fig. 5). I would arrive before opening time so as to be near the head of the line so that I would be her first customer in the bull pen. When, upon her arrival, she would see me standing

FIG 5. River Street, next to Nu'uanu Stream, showing Cottage Rooms in 1944. (Bishop Museum) 2 14 THE HAWAIIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY there, she would pull me out of the line so that I would be her first customer. That was very thoughtful of her, yet when I left the Islands again in 1944,1 neglected to tell her goodbye, a thoughtless act that I have regretted. At the end of my second contract in April 1944 (two years this time), I returned to San Francisco and notified the Selective Service Board that I was unemployed but was never called up for the draft. I became homesick for Honolulu again and returned in April 1945 to find that the houses had been closed down in the latter part of 1944. Some unthinking cops had severely roughed up and beaten one of the madams for having defied Chief Gabrielson's czar-like restrictive orders. (Denizens of houses were sometimes referred to as "inmates.") She made a public issue of it, bringing suit against Gabrielson, thereby upsetting the status quo. She later dropped the charges, but it was too late. The publicity contributed to the closure of the houses. Their activity had been allowed to exist by the territorial government in spite of occasional protests and had been stoutly supported by the military commanders as conducive to morale, but Governor Ingram M. Stainback sent them all letters saying the houses were illegal, and they had to backpedal in the face of all the publicity and join in the closure in order to comply with the law. I never did find Bobbie again. The madam, Betty Jean O'Hara (her married name was Noriger), wrote an expose, Honolulu Harlot, on the prostitution situation in Chinatown. The book reveals the seamy side of prostitution—police payoffs, for example—even though here it had been supported.3 It is notable that there were, therefore, no pimps in Honolulu. Instead, the houses advertised on the covers of matchbooks. After the houses were closed down and prostitution continued clandestinely, however, pimps did appear, wearing expensive suits and flashy jewelry, driving long black Cadillacs, tops down, and smoking big cigars, exactly as depicted by Hollywood. Thus was the untimely and ignominious end of the era of quasi- legal prostitution in Honolulu. Chief Gabrielson eventually retired and was promptly hired by the Tokyo police department as a consul- tant in U.S.-occupied postwar Japan. As my own postmortem on the issue of permitting prostitution ver- sus banning it, I would quote several insightful prewar reports. One was by Police Commissioner Victor S. K. Houston, a former territor- MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 215 ial delegate to Congress, who was asked to report on the prostitution situation in Honolulu. An excerpt from an unsigned, undated mem- orandum he found in his research and included in his report states:

Prostitution is one of the oldest vices of the human race, and civilized communities have been experimenting with its control for centuries. The only definite conclusion that has been reached is that it is likely to exist as long as the passions of the human beings remain what they are today. The lawmakers in nearly every civilized community have recognized the necessity of prohibiting females from prostitution for hire and have accordingly prohibited it. But in many communities, notwith- standing that it is a violation of law, city officials and many well-mean- ing men and women have permitted it to exist in certain localities, it being recognized that while it cannot be prevented it can be regulated and controlled.4

To me, that is a profound observation. The report further states

. . . that a Dr. William F. Snow of New York City, in working with the War Department for investigating the problem of prostitution around Army camps, was in Honolulu to study the situation here and inspected the houses. He was also given the Army version of the matter by Major W. F. Steer, CO. of the Military Police, who revealed to him the low rates of venereal disease in the Army in Hawaii. When Dr. Snow left he remarked that he had never before seen such a common sense setup as that existing here and was astonished at the low venereal disease rate that the Army and Navy were experiencing in these Islands.

The account also listed all the houses approved to continue opera- tion, their addresses, and the names of the madams and building own- ers (Table 1). The foregoing sections of his report were never officially entered into the records. Snow's official report for the record recommended that the houses be closed.5 They were not, however, and continued in operation as before until O'Hara's expose. I believe that passing laws against prostitution fails as a means of making a city "clean." I have observed that it drives the activity under- ground and leads to depravity in the same way Prohibition did. The laws against making, selling, obtaining, and drinking liquor only Table 1. Houses of Prostitution in Honolulu's Chinatown in the Early 1940s

Name Owners Landlady

Local Rooms (Aala Rooms) Hun Yee Yei Mrs. Hun Yee Yei 1026-B Aala St. 1018 Aala St. 22 girls Aala Park Rooms (Park Rooms) Annie K. Wong Leong Mrs. Hun Yee Yei 1050 Aala St. P.O. Box 1652 18 girls Bell Rooms Young Kan Lum et al. Norma Lane 137 North Kukui St. 3635 Mahina Ave. 7 girls Camp Rooms Mendonca Trust Est. Mrs. Rebecca Paakonia 1126 Smith St. Francis Sylva, trustee 8 girls Western Rooms Wong Nin Peggy Staunton 120 North Beretania St. 785 Young St. 11 girls Cottage Hotel Chun Lai Shee et al. Mickey Allen 1183 River St. P.O. Box 1759 4 girls Pacific Rooms Lum Yip Kee Frances Norman 1130 Mauna Kea St. P.O. Box 1876 4 girls Rex Rooms Lee Yau Chong Molly O'Brian 1145 Smith St. c/o Wing Coffee Co. 5 girls Senator Hotel Lum Yip Kee Ruth Davis 121 North Hotel St. P.O. Box 1876 15 girls Midway Hotel Delia Land Patricia De Corso 1243 River St. 508 Ward St. 10 girls Modern Rooms Wong Nin Virginia Martin 1133 Mauna Kea St. 785 Young St. 6 girls Ritz Rooms Chun Lai Shee et al. Helen Burton 143 North Beretania St. P.O. Box 1759 3 girls Service Hotel Y. Anin Darlene Foster 1153 Mauna Kea St. 858 Kanoa Lane 12 girls Palace Hotel Lucille K. Snyder 1252 Nuuanu St. c/o Bishop Trust Co. Honolulu Rooms Paul Siu Foon Au 347 North Beretania St. 1749 South Beretania St. Rainbow Hotel Kwai Lun Wong 1207 River St. P.O. Box 1961 Bronx Rooms Tomi Abe 1275 River St. 5 girls Mirror Rooms 154 North Hotel St. Bungalow 1166 Smith St. Anchor Rooms (Hotel) Mrs. Angeline Russell 57 North Pauahi St. 6 girls

Source: Prostitution File, Governor Ingram M. Stanback Papers, AH. MY EXPERIENCES IN THE RED-LIGHT DISTRICT 2 17 drove all that activity underground, leading to speakeasies, or clan- destine nightclubs, where liquor was served, to the growth of crime lords like Al Capone, graft, racketeering and gangsterism, with huge expenses to the taxpayers and fatalities among police officers, all in fruitless attempts to enforce that law, later recognized to be a huge mistake and repealed. If one is so inclined and desperate enough to take the risk, one can easily find a prostitute by asking bellhops, taxi drivers, bartenders, or pimps or by recognizing a streetwalker as one, laws notwithstanding, the same as during Prohibition, when one could always get liquor. That was the situation in San Francisco. It contrasted sharply and poorly with the clean, well-regulated Honolulu Chinatown, "The Best Little Red-Light District in the U.S."

NOTES 1 The exact number is unclear because two or three houses were sometimes counted as one. Depending on who was counting, the number is either eigh- teen, nineteen, or twenty. 2 See Richard A. Greer, "Collarbone and the Social Evil," HJH 7 (1976): 3-17. 3 Jean O'Hara, Honolulu Harlot (Honolulu: privately printed, 1944). 4 Victor S. K. Houston, "Abatement of Houses of Prostitution in the City and County of Honolulu," 1, ts., submitted to the Honolulu Police Commission, Sept. 26, 1941. 5 William F. Snow, Ferris F. Laune, and Samuel D. Allison, Social Protection in Hawaii: How the City of Honolulu Closed Its Red-Light District (New York: Ameri- can Social Hygiene Association, 1946).